Week in Review Nov 22/2019

The big event of the week was heading to Victoria for a one day planning day with the Open Team followed by an all-BCcampus retreat. One of the things that I love about BCcampus is all the exposure I’m getting to how meetings, planning, retreats are facilitated and set up, and of course getting to experience different liberating structures. I’d really love to up my facilitation game so I’m paying more attention to all of the small details.

One of the things that I thought worked really well for the Open Team planning day was having each person do a 5 minute lightening talk on what they were working on and where they were at in the project. I think this is really well suited to remote teams and could probably be adapted to teams of more than 10 as well. The extra element that made this work was the active listening element – each person had to note one question that they had for each presentation as well as one connecting element to their own projects. This is a great way to get to more expansive and collaborative thinking about what we do and I found it really effective.

While I was in Victoria I got news that an article I had been working on for 5 years was published in the Journal of Learning for Development. This was a longitudinal case study of how JIBC got to openness and it almost was never finished multiple times. Part of the reason is that it’s really hard to cram an 8 year case study into 6000-ish words and do it well. Another reason is that I was so busy in my admin job that research took a back seat most of the time. So I was quite honestly giddy about this news, especially since it’s been about 4 years since my last peer reviewed publication. Also, publishing in the JL4D was a bit of an academic bucket list thing for me, since I worked with Mark Bullen and Alan Tait to start this journal and for a while contributed as an Assistant Editor. In that role I learned a lot about the Open Journal system, the difficulty of getting timely peer reviews, and the importance of the gap that this journal fills.

I also got to work with Jim Luke this week on our Action Lab that we are doing at OE Global on Tuesday. I love Jim’s energy and how he thinks so I sure we are going to have a lot of fun trying to get participants to think broadly about the potential of OER and open course models. Jim is the first person I’ve encountered who is actually interested in and has actually read a paper I co-wrote about this topic and I’m glad that he pulled me in to do this with him.

Also spent a bit of time polishing my other OE Global presentation on the BCcampus research I did last year on Instructional Designers and OEPs. This will be published in the Open Praxis special issue any day now I presume so this small study has had decent reach.

The ISAT (institutional OEP self-assessment tool) research team also met and Elizabeth Childs led us through a data analysis process called Self Study. I haven’t blogged about this research that I began last year with colleagues from KPU (Rajiv Jhangiani) , TRU (Michelle Harrison and Irwin DeVries), Royal Roads (Elizabeth Childs) and UBC (Christina Hendricks), but it’s basically looking OEP at an institutional level through at a set of questions adapted from success factors for blended learning initiatives research.

This week will end with a meeting with a TRU colleague about how to measure impact and open education practices. This is one part of my role at BCcampus and I’m really hoping to have some great people in the sector to put our heads together on this one.

And most importantly, I submitted an idea for the #femedtechquilt project for OER20!